22 February 2013 10:08 PM

What Spielberg and Kushner tell Republicans and Conservatives

The movie
Lincoln, which I have just seen, is a magnificent piece of cinematic theatre,
with a mesmeric performance by Daniel Day Lewis which deserves all the plaudits
heaped upon it. Given the current state of American and indeed western
politics, however, the movie packs a particular punch that its writer and
director, those confirmed Democrats Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg, surely
never intended.

For of course
what is so startling in today's world is that it shows the Republicans
seeking and bringing an end to slavery
while the Democrats fought to retain it, terrified as they were of what it
presaged -- not just votes for 'Negroes' but true human equality, votes for
women and the unconscionable spectre of universal suffrage.

Whatever
fictions mar this script – and there have been claims that it falsely sanitises
and sanctifies Lincoln -- it cannot but
provoke thoughts about the current pathetic state of the Republican Party and
of Conservatism across the pond. For here was Republicanism, the so-called
conservative cause, on the side of morality, decency, justice and progress,
while the Democrats stood for bigotry, injustice and the most reactionary
instincts.

And here was a Republican President of the United States who, with
all the odds supposedly against his great reforming measure and apparently
facing the most invidious of moral choices, never flinched from his duty to
stand and fight for what he believed in.

Today,
Republicans and Conservatives don't know what they believe in, nor what cause
they should be fighting for or against. Divided among themselves, they are
incapable of showing any backbone in fighting today's injustices and
extinctions of freedom because they are incapable of recognising them for what
they are -- and some of these conservatives even believe they represent the
justice and freedom they actually negate -- or because they have been cowed and
terrified by the institutionalised bullying which now characterises their
liberal opponents; or both.

What I expect
was not in the minds of either Kushner or Spielberg was that, in our
modern age, the great cause of liberty has indeed come to threaten civilised
values. And it is the Democrats and their liberal comrades in the west who have
brought that about by turning the truly progressive values, against which the
southern Democrat red-necks fought in the Civil War, on their heads. They have
done this by hijacking concepts such as freedom, slavery, justice and equality
and twisting them into their very opposites.

The fight for
freedom against slavery has characterised the struggle for civilisation since
the earliest times. In the 19th century, it was a motif which did not just
focus on the emancipation of black people but underpinned just about every
progressive movement, from the temperance movement to opposition to vivisection
to votes for women and universal
suffrage.

That was because, at the root of all these great reforming causes,
lay the belief in the equality of all human beings because all were created in
the image of God. The core values we
associate with western civilisation, such as freedom under law and innate human
dignity, all rested on that core belief. That’s why all these great reforming
movements were rooted in a muscular, Bible-believing Christianity.

But in the
second half of the 20th century, that core belief took a terrible hit under the
onslaught from secularism, and for many it simply died along with religious
belief. What then happened was that western liberalism, like the mythological
pelican, started to eat itself. With God exiled from the garden of reason, the
west slithered into moral and cultural relativism. Telling itself that everyone
was his or her own autonomous moral authority, it redefined equality as
identicality, justice as group rights and freedom as libertinism with no
external constraints on individual appetites.

The result glad
been that so called progressives have turned into reactionary bullies. Western
society has turned into a Hobbesian war of all against all, in which those with
the most muscle win and the weak are trampled down. Belief in innate human
dignity has been effaced by a shallow and ultimately lethal utilitarian belief
that the only worthwhile lives are those which others deem to contribute to the
store of human happiness. Those people -- such as the faithful followers of
Biblical morality -- who dare dissent from any aspect of the liberal catechism
are vilified as bigots and imbeciles and turned into social pariahs. All of
this has not expanded freedom but cast a baleful totalitarian shadow, no less,
over western society.

And yet in the
face of this progressive extinction of justice and freedom, today's Conservatives
and Republicans are paralysed like rabbits in the headlights of an advancing
juggernaut. The principal reason why Obama is in his second term in the White
House' advancing his agenda of constraining American power to spread freedom
abroad while expanding state control of the individual at home (in his or her
own interests, of course), is not the rotten American media (culpable as they
are) but the silence and feebleness of the Republicans, who have never pursued
the Obamabots as they should have done.

And just look
at the British Prime Minister David Cameron, a supposed Conservative but who is
not just totally star-struck by Obama but actually extolled the 'community
activism' of Obama's ideological mentor, the revolutionary communist agitator
Saul Alinsky. And because no-one in the British Conservative Party had even
heard of Saul Alinsky -- who dedicated his seminal work, Rules for Radicals, to
Lucifer -- none of these boobies raised an eyebrow at the subversive banner
behind which their leader had lined up the Conservative Party.

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